Patent Application
20070143122
The present invention relates to searching in the World Wide Web (Web), and particularly to “data mining” in the Web involving a method for correlating published reviews on selected products through Web searching.
The past generation has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels, and the Web or Internet (used interchangeably herein), that had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of databases providing documents, media and computer programs through related distribution of Web documents, e.g. Web pages or electronic mail. Because of the ease with which documents are distributable via the Web, it has become a major source of data. Virtually all databases of public information throughout the world are accessible and able to be searched via the Web.
The ease with which great volumes of data may be searched from a computer attached to the Internet and equipped with a Web browser has led to the development of a type of “Web data mining” in which combinations of Web searches are used to relate fragments of data that individually appear to be innocent and non-confidential to those who made the data available; but, when pieced together, can be very valuable in what is revealed about the publishers of data and their products.
In a business environment, all companies and organizations are very concerned about how their products and the products of competitors are being rated in their marketplace. Also, product reviews are of interest to potential purchasers of and investors in selected products. The Web or Internet offers access to product reviews along with a great deal of data on the product technology and background. When someone wishes to get product review information on a product to be purchased or a product being sold, a standard approach would be to search the Web for all reviews on a particular product. The interested party then reads all of the reviews and decides which reviews are more trustworthy. The party then makes decisions based upon the reviews that he has read. This process is quite time consuming. It usually requires several individual searches. Also, in reviewing the articles and publications on the product, the user has to consume time in at least browsing through articles mentioning the product that do not review products, technical descriptions that are not reviews and marketing information. If a user tries to conventionally search a well known product, such as an automotive product, the search result may list thousands of articles.
The present invention provides a proposed solution for the above problems in searching for product reviews. The invention provides a correlated result that presents the found publications in such a mode that a user may readily determine which product reviews will satisfy his requirements. The search results also provide overall evaluations of each product review, as well as comparative review summaries that assess the individual product reviews with respect to each other.
The invention is implemented by a searching method in a public network, such as the Web or Internet, that correlates publicly available product reviews for products by initially predetermining a set of review terms indicative of a favorable review and also predetermining a set of review terms indicative of an unfavorable review. Then, from a requesting display station, databases accessible through said network are searched for the product reviews as follows.
Product reviews are distinguished from other documents mentioning the product that may also be in the searched databases. Each distinguished product review is then analyzed using the predetermined review terms indicative of favorable reviews and predetermined review terms indicative of unfavorable reviews. At this point, an overall determination is made as to whether each individual product review was favorable or unfavorable or balanced. The searches are preferably conducted using Web crawler processes that will hereinafter be discussed in greater detail.
In accordance with an aspect of the invention, there is included the steps of assigning to each of said predetermined review terms a favorability weight indicative of the favorable or unfavorable level of the term. Also, there may be determined for each product review an overall favorability or unfavorability numerical value rating based analysis criteria including said weights of and the frequency of usage of said predetermined terms. The invention also enables the dynamic addition of further review terms to said predetermined sets of review terms during said searching.
In another aspect of the invention, the searching may be carried out by a Web service provider serving the individual Web display stations, and this service provider may provide overall product ratings based upon a correlation of all product reviews for a product. This service provider may maintain a database including said overall product ratings for a plurality of said products, and can thus provide a plurality of these overall product ratings to requesting display stations on the Web.
The present invention will be better understood and its numerous objects and advantages will become more apparent to those skilled in the art by reference to the following drawings, in conjunction with the accompanying specification, in which:
Referring to
Web documents are conventionally implemented in a markup language, e.g. HTML, which is described in detail in the text, Just Java, 2nd Edition, Peter van der Linden, Sun Microsystems, 1997, particularly at Chapter 7, pp. 249-268, dealing with the handling of Web pages; and also in the text, Mastering the Internet, particularly at pp. 637-642, on HTML in the formation of Web pages. In addition, aspects of this description will refer to Web browsers. A general and comprehensive description of browsers may be found in the above-mentioned Mastering the Internet text at pp. 291-313. More detailed browser descriptions may be found in the text, Internet: The Complete Reference, Millennium Edition, M. L. Young et al., Osborne/McGraw-Hill, Berkeley Calif., 1999, Chapter 19, pp. 419-454, and Chapter 20, pp. 455-494, on the Microsoft Internet Explorer; and Chapter 21, pp. 495-512, covering Lynx, Opera and other browsers.
In light of this background, reference is made to
It will also be understood that instead of any conventional Web server, system 51 may be replaced by a server system of a service provider 47 that will conventionally perform this Web server function, along with other Web service provider functions to be subsequently described in greater detail.
The search engines 49 are described in the above-mentioned: Internet: The Complete Reference, Milleniun Edition, pages 395 and 522-535, search engines use keywords and phrases to query the Web for desired subject matter. Usually the keywords are combined with some of the basic Boolean operators, i.e. AND, OR and NOT, in designing Web queries. Each search engine has its own well developed syntax or rules for combining such Boolean operators with the keywords to conduct the searches. The search engine usually uses a search agent called a “spider” or “crawler” that looks for information on Web pages. Such information is indexed and stored in a vast database. In carrying out its search, the search engine looks through the database for matches to keywords subject to the engine syntax. In the present invention, the search engine then presents to the user a list of the Web pages it had determined to have the job listings sought in the requested query that contain job listings including the competitors' name or products. Some significant search engines are: AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, Magellan, Webcrawler and Yahoo.
Referring to
A Read Only Memory (ROM) 16 is connected to CPU 10 via bus 12 and includes the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) that controls the basic computer functions. RAM 14, I/O adapter 18 and communications adapter 34 are also interconnected to system bus 12. I/O adapter 18 may be a Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) adapter that communicates with the disk storage device 20. Communications adapter 34 interconnects bus 12 with an outside network. I/O devices are also connected to system bus 12 via user interface adapter 22 and display adapter 36. Keyboard 24 and mouse 26 are all interconnected to bus 12 through user interface adapter 22. It is through such input zadevices that the user at the Web display stations may interactively relate to the Web server programs for providing the searching and search documents of the present invention.
Display adapter 36 includes a frame buffer 39 that is a storage device that holds a representation of each pixel on the display screen 38. Images may be stored in frame buffer 39 for display on monitor 38 through various components, such as a digital to analog converter (not shown) and the like. By using the aforementioned I/O devices, a user is capable of inputting information to the system through the keyboard 24 or mouse 26 and receiving output information from the system via display 38.
FAVORABLE: good, excellent, perfect, flawless, exact, exemplary, ideal, suitable, qualified, reliable, safe, . . . extra.
UNFAVORABLE: bad, faulty, poor, adverse, harmful, undesirable, weak . . . slow.
The terms: weak and undesirable 64 from the unfavorable predetermined review terms show up in the article, as well as the terms perfect 63 and extra 62 from the favorable predetermined review terms. Also, two terms “fair” and “disappointing” 65 are not on any of the lists. When such additional terms show up in an article being reviewed, the user is enabled to add the term to one of the predetermined review terms lists. In the present example the user has pointed to and, thus, highlighted the term “disappointing” 65. When a new term is so highlighted, the user has the option of selecting either “Add to Favorable” 66 or “Add to Unfavorable” 67 by clicking on the associated entry circle 68. In the present example, the user has selected to add “disappointing” 65 to the set of predetermined Unfavorable Review terms.
The evaluations of the product review articles are usually carried out transparently to the user. In evaluating the favorable and unfavorable aspects of the product reviews, the review terms may be individually weighted. For example, with respect to favorable review terms, “perfect” would be given a greater predetermined weight than “good” or with respect to unfavorable review terms, “undesirable” would be given a greater weight than “weak”.
As previously mentioned, and particularly when a Web service provider is involved, a summary of several review articles may be provided to a user at a receiving station as shown in
Now, with reference to
An illustrative run of the process set up in
Although certain preferred embodiments have been shown and described, it will be understood that many changes and modifications may be made therein without departing from the scope and intent of the appended claims.
